I’d be willing to bet that behind a change like this is a certain amount of data showing that the removed options weren’t used that frequently, and a stakeholder decision that this must mean that they should be demoted. And it’s data driven. Makes for a nice bullet point in a report. Most users don’t miss it, on stakeholders can tell themselves that those that you are a minority who don’t really matter for one reason or another.
And as technology moves from tool that provides value to be paid for to cultural experience to be farmed, aesthetic changes drive a sense of currency and progress more than utility -and take a greater place of focus (and we’re a long ways from a time with a respected UX class considering utility even if the larger teleology valued it).
> I’d be willing to bet that behind a change like this is a certain amount of data showing that the removed options weren’t used that frequently,
On a normal OS you have to change usual settings exactly once.
> data showing that the removed options weren’t used that frequently
This is literally the shitshow that's post-Ribbon Microsoft UX in a nutshell.
In the 90s, they designed a logical ontology, then mapped every item somewhere into that.
Post-Ribbon, they pulled whatever happened to be most-commonly used in, and then everything else got stuffed in a jumbled junk drawer (because who uses that?).
What seems to have been lost in the move from one to the other is anyone at Microsoft giving a goddamn 2 seconds of thought, minimum, to EVERY item in the OS.
And because that thought was never given, you get wildly broken edge cases and odd settings, simply because it wasn't anyone's job to make sure everything had a place.
Ribbonification (aka polish the 80% and fuck the 20%) isn't bad for users: it's bad because it lets Microsoft be lazy about organizing.
> data showing that the removed options weren’t used that frequently [...] Most users don’t miss it
Um, I am very skeptical that Microsoft's KPIs have this level of alignment with actual user workflows.
You really should assume that Microsoft knows exactly what you do on their machine.
They know _what_ you do. They don't know _why_ you do it.
Where did I say they didn't?
Of course they do. It's all the telemetry that some people complain about.
I'm not denying the existence of intrusive telemetry, I'm saying their KPIs do not care whether they break your workflows?
I wonder how much overlap there is between people who disable telemetry and people who use the right mouse button in Explorer.
Without knowing exactly how far the common "debloat" Windows tools go, which every computer-toucher seems to recommend, I'd assume the overlap between "Users that disable, intentionally or otherwise, telemetry" and "Users that use 'Right-click -> More Options'" isn't quite a circle - but it is approaching one